Summary: A joint biography of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor.
I have been wanting to get around to The Life You Save May Be Your Own since it came out in the early 2000s. After having read a brief biography of Dorothy Day and a book of essays about Thomas Merton earlier this summer, I decided it was time. I have also read three books about O’Connor, a more academic look at her work, a short biography, and a collection of her early journals I felt like I had a pretty good handle on O’Connor. But I knew nothing about Walker Percy outside of his novels.
Elie mostly tells the story chronologically. Dorothy Day is almost 20 years older than Merton and Percy and nearly 30 years older than O’Connor. But she also lived longer than both Merton and O’Connor. And while Percy lived until 1990, and Day passed away in 1980, Day was 83 when she passed away, and Percy was only 73.
All four are well-known Catholic writers who were consciously Catholic in different ways. O’Connor was the only cradle Catholic, the other three were all adult converts to Catholicism. O’Connor and Percy were both also very much Southern Writers while Day was most identified with NYC and her non-fiction writing. Merton was the most clearly a “spiritual” writer and the only clergy member of the group.
As a biography or a group of biographies, this was well written and included good detail on their lives as well as context on their writing. But as a stand-alone, I think it was too long. It was too long to feel like a brief biography and it was too short to be a definitive biography of any of them. It was interesting to see how much the four of them interacted and wrote one another, although there were very few personal interactions. Merton considered joining the Catholic Worker movement but decided instead to become a monk. They all had mutual friends, and drafts of different books were passed around.
The value of the book was in the exploration of the different ways to think of themselves as writers and “Catholic” writers and how they related to the church more broadly. I don’t regret reading The Life You Save May Be Your Own, but I did pick it up over the summer when I tend to hit a reading slump. And the length of the book did not help the reading slump.
The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook
Love that you managed to pick it up! It is quite long when you are in a reading slump–I had/continue to have the same problem. I had to read it in stages, and I was especially interested in the connections between the writers. O’Connor for me was the showcase, but so was Merton, and I especially appreciated the way the book allowed me a new perspective on him.
Agreed that stand alone for each was too short…but for me the attraction was seeing them side by side, and understanding the context of what they brought to American spirituality.
I can only respond to how I recieved it, but it just felt both too long and not long enough, but is that an objective evaluation of the book or mostly about being in a reading slump?